DARPA Sees a Future Battlefield With Drone Ships and Super Soldiers

DARPA offered a glimpse of where the Pentagon's mad science agency is headed on Tuesday, when director Arati Prabhakar and deputy director Steven Walker briefed reporters at a press conference in Washington the agency's most futuristic defense projects.

Land, Sea, and Air

Unmanned vehicles will play a starring role in the armed forces of the future, not just in the air, but also at sea and in space, Walker said. Leading the way is DARPA's ACTUV program, which funded the construction of the world's largest unmanned drone ship. The ship, which measures about 130 feet long, entered the water at a shipyard near Portland, Oregon in January, and will be christened on April 7, Walker said.

DARPA plans to use this prototype over the next year and a half to perfect the technology needed to operate an autonomous vessel at sea for months at a time. During its mission, the drone will range for thousands of miles while obeying the appropriate maritime laws. "We're thinking about missions like countermine missions," Walker said, "logistics resupply, potentially." Rather than replacing conventional warships, Walker envisions future drone ships playing support roles for manned ships.

Likewise, future flying drones will back up manned aircraft, even launching from and returning to them. Demonstrating the ability to launch from a plane—for example, to perform long-range scouting missions—and return to their airborne base, is the purpose of DARPA's recently begun Gremlins program. Prabhakar said at the conference that with Gremlins, her agency is working to "open up" the capabilities of today's drones "by creating small unmanned systems that could be kicked out of a large aircraft, execute a mission, but then come back and be reused." DARPA is planning to use a Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport plane to launch the drones.

To bring drone-like capabilities to space, DARPA is developing a rapid-fire satellite launch vehicle through XS-1, its unmanned reusable space plane program. If successful, the experimental rocket-powered plane will launch ten times in as many days to loft satellites at a rate never before seen. "We're hoping that we could launch an XS-1 repeatedly with 3,000-pound payloads for about $5 million a launch," Walker said. This would give the DoD the ability to launch swarms of satellites at practically a moment's notice.

Of course, autonomous vehicles like these run the risk of getting hacked, which is why DARPA created its HACMS program. "The Defense Department systems are chock-full of embedded processors," said Prabhakar, "and while they may not look or feel like they're connected to the Internet...in fact there are paths in and that is indeed a concern."

Software developed for HACMS recently demonstrated the ability to shield an unmanned helicopter from getting hacked in flight, Prabhakar said. "We had a red team of attackers that tried everything they could to get in," she said. "We made it as easy for them as we could. We even gave them source code, but they were not able to break into the system."

Into the Mind

Even as they are keeping hackers out of military IT systems, DARPA researchers are at the same time doing their best to hack into the systems of the human brain. It took close to ten years, but DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program last year demonstrated the ability to drive prosthetic devices through direct neural interfaces. Now the agency is working to integrate mind and machine even further.

DARPA

Two days before the press conference, DARPA announced that a team of researchers in Australia, working under the RE-NET program, had demonstrated an array of electrodes that could be implanted in the brain by means of a stent threaded through a vein. This improves on the electrode array that was placed on the brain's surface for Revolutionizing Prosthetics and which required brain surgery to install.

Other brain-machine interface programs at DARPA include the HAPTIX program, which seeks to give prosthetics users the ability to feel artificial limbs just as they would natural arms, and SUBNETS, which seeks to cure neurological diseases by means of implants. This research is geared toward rehabilitation, but it could nevertheless lead to more in the future.

"It's absolutely often the case that as we learn more about the brain and the nervous system that you can start seeing all kinds of other applications that lead to enhancement of function rather than just restoration," said Prabhakar. Such enhancements, she said, could include superhuman senses or conscious control of autonomic functions like heart rate and blood pressure, which could help soldiers aim and fire a weapon.

"Continue to watch this space," Prabhakar said.

Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs.

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